Ordinal DV correlation analysis

New Member

I am working on a project to analyze the frequency of use of public transit by an individual.
However, One of my output variable "Frequency of use " is an ordinal scale with the 4 different categories: often, sometimes, rarely, never. I have treated this variable on a numerical scale with 1- never, 2- rarely, 3- sometimes 4- often.

My categories are ordered but we cannot say that there is truly a one unit difference between often, sometimes, rarely, and never. So I am not sure if I have treated this variable correctly by converting it to a numerical scale.

Please, can you let me know if this is the correct approach to treating the variable?

I am trying to look at the correlation between this ordinal variable and non-normal continuous data. Is spearman correlation test the correct way to test the correlation? Is there any other alternative that can be used